Act of Injustice Page 3

  James relied on the few dollars he earned from the oats and corn he grew, supplemented by occasional carpentry jobs. He accepted that he would always be poor, and blamed his lack of wealth on the independent spirit he’d inherited from his father and grandfather. They had refused to kowtow to the selfish and mercenary “best families” who had come early to Upper Canada.

  James aimed to be his own man, even if he couldn’t be rich. “It’s said I’m stiff-necked,” he told his wife. “My family’s always been that way. Better that than bow down to people we have no use for.”

  Those he had no use for included Jews – although James had never met one – all coloured people, the local Indians, and any farmer who owned more land than his family could cultivate on their own. He didn’t particularly like Catholics but being of a practical turn of mind, he readily accepted Molly’s insistence that their children be raised in the Church of Rome. He was not unkind. Unlike many men he knew, James Leppard did not beat his wife. He disciplined his children only enough to make them obedient, for a time.

  Unschooled – except in profanity – and illiterate, James Leppard was ignorant about many things but he did not lack intelligence. He could be shrewd in his business deals. Sometimes too shrewd, as when he let a crop of perfectly good barley rot in its field rather than accept an unfair price from the miller in Vandeleur. He understood the care that animals needed if they were to supply the family with milk, eggs and meat. He knew when and where the fish were most likely to bite and could tell, by scents in the night air, when a herd of deer presented an opportunity for a kill. He could splint a child’s broken arm quicker than the limb could show a bruise. These were valuable assets in the struggle to survive in a place where a visit to a doctor involved a half day of travel. Some of this knowledge he’d gained by instinct and some he’d figured out himself. But most of it was handed down from his father and his forefathers. He was rich in the lore of country life, absorbed from the wisdom of generations on the land.

  Chapter 4

  INTO THE QUEEN’S BUSH

  September 30, 1854

  Outside the Grey County Court Building, the wind was picking up speed and threatening to bring more snow to the leeward side of Georgian Bay. In the courtroom, James Leppard shifted in his seat beside Molly. When she reached to hold his hand, her gesture reminded him of the day they’d met. It was at the fall fair in the tiny Ontario community of Colgan, the last day of September of 1854, and Molly had been sitting behind a table filled with gourds of all sizes, shapes and colours. She had green eyes and red hair and spoke with an Irish lilt that fascinated him.

  “Are you enjoying the fair now, dear sir?” she had asked, her mouth curling into a smile. They were in a field where hundreds of visitors had gathered for a plowing match and horse races, the sale of home baking and sewing and knitting, and the showing of prize cattle. It had been a year since James, now eighteen years old, had left home and found work as a hired man. James lingered at the girl’s table as long as he dared. Molly O’Malley, he learned, was new to the district, sent from Toronto to serve the family of Edward Edinborough, the biggest landowner in the district.

  “They wanted us out of Toronto,” Molly told James. “We were dying of the typhoid in Montreal and Kingston. They figured all us Irish carried the disease in our veins. We wouldn’t be here but we were starving in Ireland. No more potatoes, nothing to eat. We had to get out.

  “I’m seventeen now,” Molly said. “Mrs. Edinborough says I’m old enough to be thinking of making my own family. She says if I find a husband who’s willing to work for them, we can stay with them forever.” She smiled and blinked her eyes in the sunshine. “But maybe I’d sooner go off somewhere, just to see what life might bring me.”

  James took it as a hint she’d like a man who could free her of the servitude of the Edinborough household. He told her he had felt the same way in his home village of Hope,* three day’s walk to the east. “It was a religious colony, the Children of Peace,” James said. “I felt trapped there, watched over every moment of the day. I couldn’t wait to leave.”

  Three months after meeting Molly, James attended a Christmas social at St. James Roman Catholic Church. He had spoken with her several times and now, he decided, the time had come to get serious. “I think we should get married,” he said. “What do you think?” Molly showed no surprise at James’s question. She’s probably been expecting me to ask, he thought.

  “You’d have to become a Catholic,” Molly answered.

  “I don’t mind,” James replied. He’d do anything to capture this lovely young girl.

  The traditional Catholic wedding ceremony was attended by several of Molly’s aunts and uncles and a few friends. After their wedding, the babies came along quickly. The first, Thomas, was a big boy who came into the world with a head of curly red hair. The next three babies died in a cholera epidemic.

  James also learned it was not easy for a Catholic – even a nominal Catholic, like himself – to find fair treatment in a place where the religion of Rome was considered an alien intrusion, something to be detested and feared.

  “We have to get out of here,” James told Molly. “They don’t want to hire me and when they do, they won’t pay nothin’ at all.”

  Molly had relatives in the new territory of the Queen’s Bush that reached all the way to Georgian Bay. She encouraged James in the idea of moving there. “My brothers in Grey County will put us up until we get our own place,” she said. “They say there’s free land there.”

  James sold their few sticks of furniture and with Molly, the boys Thomas and Joe and their sisters Bridget and Elizabeth, the Leppards set out. They took turns riding the single horse James owned, picking up the Sydenham Road as it curved toward Georgian Bay. After five days they reached the new settlement of Flesherton. They found it as untidy as the other villages they’d known. At the general store, James bought a bag of flour and asked directions to Thomas O’Malley’s clearing. He was told to branch off the road to the right, follow a path through the bush for four miles, and he would soon come on to the place.

  They heard the hogs before they could see the shanty that Thomas and his brother Joseph had erected. The animals were rooting in a ditch where garbage had been thrown. A man rushed out of the shanty, shouting at the hogs. He stopped suddenly when he saw James, Molly and the children. “Those hogs’ll eat anything,” he cried, “and there’s poison weed in that ditch. But I’m mighty glad to see you all, never thought we’d live long enough to welcome you.”

  It was Thomas O’Malley, Molly’s eldest brother. “Sister, it’s a blessed thing to see you,” he said. He was barefoot and wore only an old pair of overalls and a torn shirt. In a few minutres, Thomas’s wife Mary, their two children and his brother Joseph were adding their welcomes. After driving the hogs back to the pigsty Thomas set about preparing a barbecue in an outdoor fire pit.

  The meal of pork ribs was enlivened by talk of what the brothers had accomplished in their two years on the land. That summer they had harvested eighty bushels of wheat and twenty-five bushels of oats, along with Indian corn, potatoes, turnips and in the spring, fifty pounds of maple syrup.

  “It is mighty lonely up here, like living in the forest. But you get used to it,” Thomas told James. “No cussed neighbours to bother you. About the only problem we have is bears, they come around trying to eat up the oat crop or snag a hog. Soon fall will be here and the bears will need to fatten themselves for winter. They’re cantankerous and dangerous. You can help us keep watch tonight.”

  Along about ten o’clock, as the mosquitoes and gnats made good meals of the men, a horrible noise came from a paddock behind the shanty. “Bear’s got a hog,” Joseph shouted. A huge black bear had a sizeable hog in its jaws and was shaking it like a terrier would shake a rat. “Let’s go after it,” Thomas hollered.

  The chase carried the three men and their dogs into the woods, just shy of a cedar swamp. James carried a flintlock rifle, a relic of the
War of 1812. He caught up to the bear as the dogs were nipping at its flanks. James fired. A cloud obscured the moon and the forest fell dark. He waited for the smoke from his rifle to clear. James saw the bear, now dead, huge and black, lodged against the trunk of a pine tree. He had shot it in the heart. The two dogs chewed at its hind leg. He watched the porker as it struggled in the weeds, covered in blood.

  A week later, having decided to leave their children with Thomas and Mary, James and Molly set off to find land for themselves. They followed the Boyne River to where it merged with the Beaver River below the raging torrent of Eugenia Falls. Looking up, they saw a green and purple escarpment and once having climbed it, a vast stretch of high tableland. “There has to be good land here free and clear,” James declared. “Why, we’ll live like kings once we get a cabin up.”

  The free land that James Leppard thought he would find in the Queen’s Bush was no longer free. He had arrived too late, and had to satisfy himself with six gravelly acres still unclaimed, a rough and stony patch of land reached by a trail that lead from the Eugenia Falls. It was all that remained of a fifty-acre lot where the rest of the land, looking decidedly more promising, had been deeded to an earlier arrival. Even so, he had to pay two dollars an acre. Custom dictated that he cultivate crops and put up a habitation as a claim to permanent ownership.

  As poor as the land might appear to other eyes, to James Leppard these few acres were a treasure. They changed him from a footless wanderer to a man of property, proud to own the land on which his children scurried about in their play. It was a start. That was what counted, and he was sure it would someday lead him to richer property and a better future.

  “We’ve got a good crop of stones but this land isn’t worth a damn,” James told Molly one night after he’d spent twelve hours dislodging rocks and carrying them to the side of a field he hoped to plow.

  “I suppose you’re going to blame me for us coming up here,” Molly answered. “When I think how easy I had it before I married you, I’m sorry for the day we ever met.”

  “Don’t say that Molly,” James said. “I know I’m the one that wanted us to move off on our own. We’ve just got to stick together, that’s all we can do. Things will get better.” He drew Molly to him and stroked her hair. She sobbed, then looked up and James saw a small smile come over her face.

  “I’ll never leave you, James. But I’m so tired.”

  “If I could get together enough money to buy some proper stuff for farming,” James said, “we’d be a lot better off. A good plow and a reaper would set us up just fine.”

  The day that James took a bag of potatoes to Henderson’s store, intent on trading for tea and sugar, he heard of a way to earn the money he so desperately needed.

  “Why don’t you go up to Owen Sound,” Mr. Henderson told him. “They say there’s jobs on the lake boats for shipwrights. A good carpenter like you should be able to do that kind of work.”

  When James got home he talked to Molly about this new opportunity. “If it means you can come back with a few dollars, go ahead,” Molly told him. “We’ll manage without you somehow.”

  All that summer James worked the boats sailing into Georgian Bay and the big lakes, Huron, Michigan and Superior. He tore up and replaced deck planks, repaired cabins, and once dove underwater to patch a rudder damaged on an uncharted rock, saving a trip to dry dock. That happened near the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie, and the captain decided to tie up for a day to give his crew a rest.

  James wandered into town. On a bluff overlooking the river, he found a Roman Catholic church. Near it sat a building whose front doorstep sagged to one side. It would not be hard to fix, James thought. While he watched, a nun emerged and walked to the church. James presumed he was looking at a convent. There must be a Mother Superior about.

  When James knocked on the door nothing happened for a long time. Finally, it opened a crack. He saw in the dim light a woman wearing a nun’s habit. He gave his name and offered to repair the sunken doorstep.

  “Wait here,” he was told. After a few minutes the door opened again and another nun came out. They talked. She said she was Sister Bernadette and that yes, the doorstep needed fixing. The building had been an old warehouse before it was taken over by the Sisters of St. Joseph.

  Sister Bernadette agreed to give James a meal and pay him a dollar to fix the doorstep. He’d work first, and eat later. When James lifted off a foundation block, he realized he was into a bigger job than he’d expected. Summoning Sister Bernadette, he asked permission to go into the cellar.

  “Is that really necessary?” she asked. “It’s not very nice down there. We try to stay out of it. Just do what you can to shore up the doorstep.”

  A hopeless task, James told himself. He would have to get into the cellar. There was a trapdoor just around the corner. Lifting it revealed the source of the problem. The floor of the cellar had sunk on one side, causing the beams to lean crazily. It was a wonder the whole building hadn’t collapsed.

  James noticed several mounds of fresh earth. He began to poke at one pile, and felt something hard. Scraping away the dirt, he found a wooden box. He heard footsteps, and saw Sister Bernadette make her way into the cellar.

  “Whatever are you doing?” She sounded alarmed. “There’s no need to poke around like that.”

  This was when the awful thought came to James. He’d heard stories about this sort of thing. Babies buried in convent cellars. Children of the nuns, their fathers priests. The babies baptized, and then drowned in the baptismal water. A Catholic ritual.

  James had never been comfortable in the Catholic Church. It wasn’t just that he’d felt discriminated against back in Adjala Township. Growing up Protestant, he’d heard tales of Popish evil and had been warned against mixing with Catholics. Now he understood why.

  “You’ve got babies buried here,” he blurted. “When did you bury the last one? Look, there’s fresh earth. No wonder you didn’t want me down here.”

  “Oh dear God,” Sister Bernadette answered. “Is that what you think? I knew I shouldn‘t have let you start this job.”

  “But you did, and now your secret’s out.”

  “There’s no secret. No babies. It’s all lies. Slanderous, despicable lies, spread by spiteful Protestants. They hate us. They write evil books about us. Like that book by that dreadful woman in Montreal, claiming to reveal the confessions of a nun. We’re forbidden to read it.”

  James had heard tales of misbehavour between Catholic priests and nuns. There must be some truth in all the stories, he thought. “Explain what’s been going on, then,” he demanded.

  The explanation Sister Bernadette gave James was that in the early days of Sault Ste. Marie, settlers had hidden guns in the cellar of the storehouse. They were to be brought out only when needed for protection against Indian raids. They’d been forgotten for years. When the nuns heard about the buried weapons, they decided to dig them up, one or two at a time, so as not to cause suspicion. They sold the guns and used the money to help the poor.

  “There could be no greater sin than taking the life of an innocent babe,” Sister Bernadette said. “Unless it be the sin of breaking our vows of chastity, poverty and obedience. Holy vows. We are all brides of Jesus Christ. We would never betray Him.”

  James dug about some more as Sister Bernadette watched. “Go ahead, open it,” she told him when he had dug a box clear. The box was long and narrow. He broke it open. Two old flintlock rifles. He held one up.

  “This don’t mean there’s no babies down here,” he said. He felt shamed by the accusation he’d made. But neither was he prepared to admit he had been wrong.

  “You can see for yourself there’s only guns,” the nun told him. James grunted, a muted response intended to commit him neither way. He told Sister Bernadette it would take at least two men to repair the sunken beams. He had no time to finish the job. There were other piles of dirt in the cellar, but he never bothered to disturb them.

  Wh
en James got home, he told Molly what had happened. He was convinced he had found a secret burial ground where infants had been sacrificed to save the nuns from shame and the Church from scandal.

  Molly was aghast at his story.

  “Never, no not ever will I believe you. Don’t you dare say anything to anyone about this. True or not, you’re not to repeat it. You’ll burn in hell if you do.”

  “Maybe so, but I can no longer be a Catholic,” James said. “And I’ll do better when people know I’m not one. Stay in the Church if you want. Let the children believe whatever you tell them.”

  “You’ll pay for this, James. And the rest of us, too. We’ll all suffer God’s wrath.”

  James tried but could not get out of his head the image of babies being buried in the convent cellar. He remembered his own little ones, especially Rosannah. She was a beautiful child, always cheerful. Despite her rebellious ways and the problems she caused, she was his favourite of all his children.

  After Rosannah turned thirteen, James noticed she no longer kept him constant company as he went about his chores. One day, James discovered her behind the barn, crying while she cradled a kitten.

  It took James a long time to coax Rosannah into telling him the cause of her tears. A bit at a time, the truth came out. It concerned Father Quinn, the priest at St. Agnes Catholic Church. Now he understood why Rosannah had been distancing herself from not just her father, but from her brothers as well. Father Quinn had kept her in the sacristy one afternoon, where she’d been folding vestments and alter cloths.

  “Father Quinn asked me if I was still pure. I told him yes. He said he must do something so I would stay pure. Then he put his finger in me, down there. And something else, too. He told me only God would know, and I must tell no one.